PatternFly Roadmap Update

Last November we published the PatternFly roadmap where we put forward the idea for PatternFly 4 and 5, an effort around web components, and a CSS rewrite. Alpha releases for PatternFly 4 and PatternFly Web Components delivered initial progress on these efforts. However, the story has grown more complex with the introduction of additional PatternFly framework repositories. In this post we will provide a status update on our delivery of our roadmap, and explain how all these repositories and future versions tie together.

The Big Picture

The PatternFly design system consists of:

A set of patterns for use in enterprise applications

A CSS implementation of the patterns’ visuals

JS implementations of the patterns’ behaviours

Implementations of the behaviours are offered via multiple framework integrations (Angular, React, and jQuery) to enable more code reuse and increase developer productivity. We are positioning web components as our vehicle for code reuse between our framework integrations, as described in a previous PatternFly Web Component post.

Independent releases

Each of the PatternFly repositories will move forward with an independent release cycle and version (following http://semver.org). This is in contrast with the version lock we’ve had to date between PatternFly and Angular-PatternFly.

Angular-PatternFly 4

Taking advantage of this break in the PatternFly/Angular-PatternFly version lock, we have released Angular-PatternFly 4.0.0. Refer to the release notes fro complete details, but the major deliverables of this release are:

A port of the Angular directives to Angular 1.5+ components

The jQuery dependency is now optional

A major ui-bootstrap dependency update

A number of new component implementations

Angular-Patternfly 4.0.0 relies on version 3.25.0 of PatternFly..

PatternFly 4

The changes introduced to date in the Patternfly 4 Alpha and RC’s did not warrant a major version bump. As such those changes were merged back into the master branch, and delivered as PatternFly 3.25.0.

We will move forward with a PatternFly 4 effort centered around splitting the CSS and jQuery implementations into separate repositories to be consistent with our model of PatternFly presented above. This will facilitate uses cases that consume PatternFly CSS but don’t want to bring in the jQuery implementations, such as the various framework integrations.

PatternFly will also move to a continuous release process, rather than the current sprint-based release cycle. A release will be triggered with every PR merge to master, applying semantic versioning as appropriate. This will make it easier for downstream to consume PatternFly changes in a timely manner.

Framework Repositories

PatternFly Web Components and PatternFly React have initial releases and will move forward with a continuous release process. Look for a PatternFly-ng release soon.

PatternFly CSS

What we initially called “PatternFly 5” is being carried out in the PatternFly-CSS repository. It consists of a rewrite of our CSS based on Bootstrap 4. Check out the PatternFly-CSS component showcase to follow along with progress. When this new CSS implementation is ready, it will replace the current CSS implementation.

Get involved

There is a place for everyone to get involved in one of our PatternFly repositories.